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Waking Up on the Wrong Side of a Ratings War

Matt Lauer and Ann Curry on Curry’s last day as co-host of the ‘‘Today’’ show.Credit
Photo illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times. Digital composite by Picturehouse. Video still from NBC.

One Wednesday last month, Ann Curry, camouflaged in a hat and trench coat, trudged into the art-deco lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It had been nine months since she was pushed out as co-host of the “Today” show. Curry was now NBC’s “national and international correspondent” and the anchor at large for “Today,” but these titles seemed honorary. Curry had appeared on “Today” only a handful of times since her ouster. She had no role in NBC’s coverage of election night or Inauguration Day. She taped a few stories for “Rock Center,” the prime-time newsmagazine show, but as she explained on Twitter, her bosses kept rescheduling them. Curry had moved to an office on the 27th floor of 30 Rock, far from her NBC News bosses on the third floor. On this morning, she was at work on a short “NBC Nightly News” segment about the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. It would be only her sixth appearance on the network all year.

For NBC, limiting Curry’s exposure seemed wise. Her tear-stained departure from “Today” had become a public-relations debacle, deeply damaging the most lucrative franchise in television news. Just one day after Curry signed off, the advantage “Today” had over its top rival, ABC’s “Good Morning America,” turned into a 600,000-viewer deficit. Millions in advertising revenue vanished.

If the network was still reeling from her mismanaged departure, Curry, who spent much of the past year lying low at her home in New Canaan, Conn., had not yet recovered, either. She still often woke before dawn as if she were about to go on the air. Some mornings, she cried as she read e-mail and Twitter messages from fans. For weeks she couldn’t bring herself to return to 30 Rock, where her closed office door bore a red Post-it note that read “Do Not Enter” in capital letters.

Many executives at the network never grasped how profoundly hurt and humiliated Curry remained — not just by her televised dismissal but by all the backstage machinations that led to that fateful morning. Curry felt that the boys’ club atmosphere behind the scenes at “Today” undermined her from the start, and she told friends that her final months were a form of professional torture. The growing indifference of Matt Lauer, her co-host, had hurt the most, but there was also just a general meanness on set. At one point, the executive producer, Jim Bell, commissioned a blooper reel of Curry’s worst on-air mistakes. Another time, according to a producer, Bell called staff members into his office to show a gaffe she made during a cross-talk with a local station. (Bell denies both incidents.) Then several boxes of Curry’s belongings ended up in a coat closet, as if she had already been booted off the premises. One staff person recalled that “a lot of time in the control room was spent making fun of Ann’s outfit choices or just generally messing with her.” On one memorable spring morning, Curry wore a bright yellow dress that spawned snarky comparisons to Big Bird. The staff person said that others in the control room, which included 14 men and 3 women, according to my head count one morning, Photoshopped a picture of Big Bird next to Curry and asked co-workers to vote on “Who wore it best?”

Curry had spent 22 years, a majority of her professional life, in the hallways of the NBC headquarters. She knew 30 Rock’s shortcuts: the side door out of Studio 1A that allowed her to dart across 49th Street and avoid the tourists; and the exit that ensured she would bump into autograph seekers in the concourse. But on this March morning, according to a colleague, she was standing in the lobby and was unable to find her employee badge. Instead of being waved through by a security guard or rescued by one of the legions of pages or young producers from “Today,” Curry queued up at NBC’s visitors’ center, where the lunch-delivery guys and MSNBC guests announced themselves. Her attempts at being unnoticed, in her trench coat and hat, were backfiring. When it was her turn, Curry immediately apologized to the guard — gratuitous apologies were one of her on-air trademarks. The guard looked at her quizzically.

Many people dismiss morning television as fluff, but the morning hours are where the money is. While the Internet has upended the nightly news, and on-demand services like Netflix continue to disrupt prime time, the morning shows remain one place in the TV industry where the business model still really works, at least for now. Thanks to its five million daily viewers and four hours of irrepressible cheer, “Today” earns NBC $500 million in annual revenue. By 2011, the year the network was acquired by Comcast, the show was effectively subsidizing the rest of the news division, including “NBC Nightly News” and “Meet the Press.” It was also propping up NBC’s sagging prime-time lineup by providing free promotional time for “The Voice” or whatever crime drama the network was trying at 10 p.m. that week.

“Today” was able to do all this for a very specific reason: it was winning the ratings game. Being No. 1 in the morning matters not just in the amount that sales representatives can extract from advertisers — though “Today” made an estimated $150 million more than its second-place rival, “Good Morning America,” in 2011 — but also in reputation, in pride and in sheer television-industry pull. “Today” had the upper hand in booking A-list celebrities. It had the clout to insist that a politician talk to Lauer before anyone else. NBC recruiters dangled face time on “Today” when trying to hire a correspondent away from a rival network.

The importance of holding on to the top spot led to intense pressure and, on occasion, pretty bad behavior. Behind the scenes, “Today” regularly came up with new Nielsen ratings tricks (clever use of commercials excluded less-popular segments from ratings); sneaky ways to reward guests for giving interviews (one family received accommodations at an NBC-owned theme park); and stunts to get under the skin of “G.M.A.” (when the competition booked Katie Couric as a weeklong guest host, “Today” countered with her nemesis, Sarah Palin). There was no shortage of squabbling among the hosts over airtime, who got to interview the president, say, or who had to do the talking-animal segment. The key, of course, was preventing viewers from getting even the faintest whiff of the cutthroat attitudes lurking off camera. After all, morning TV, unlike the news or late night, is a team sport in which all the players’ fates are intertwined. And more than any other show, “Today” had sold itself as a family — “America’s First Family.”

The comings and goings of family members on “Today” have always been fraught. But, with the exception of Deborah Norville’s disastrously brief succession of Jane Pauley in 1990, the show’s producers have prided themselves on executing smooth handoffs: from Bryant Gumbel to Lauer in 1997; Couric to Meredith Vieira in 2006; and Vieira to Curry in 2011. The show accomplished these seamless transitions largely by grooming potential successors on the air. Research indicated that viewers preferred it that way; they felt they had a vested interest in the person’s success and often remarked in surveys that they were “rooting” for the person to be promoted all along. Before being promoted to co-host, Couric was a correspondent on the show; Lauer and Curry were news readers. Vieira, who came from “The View” on ABC, was also a known and liked quantity when she landed on “Today,” a promotion to be sure. Each of these transitions was carefully orchestrated to appear as an anointment or a retirement.

Despite the inherent risks of high-profile successions, “Today” managed to defeat “Good Morning America” in the ratings every week since Dec. 11, 1995. By 2012, “the streak,” as it was called in the business, had come to define “Today.” As the show neared 840 consecutive winning weeks, however, it was at risk. On the week starting Jan. 9, for example, the show’s lead over “G.M.A.,” which had been roughly 1.1 million viewers one year earlier, had been cut nearly in half. Viewers were increasingly attracted to “G.M.A.,” which, in the Robin Roberts-George Stephanopoulos era, had become brighter and lighter — the cast was more bubbly and the stories more gossip-laden. And short: If you didn’t like what they were covering, you could just wait 45 seconds and the cast would be on to a Chihuahua playing pool. NBC executives could complain all they wanted about “the crap on ‘G.M.A.,’ ” as one of them put it, but viewers voted every day, and more of them were voting for the competition.

By comparison, “Today” had stuck to the same camera angles and scripted intros and outros since the 1990s. Some suggested that the show was getting stale. Others privately wondered if Lauer’s star power was beginning to fade. By January, Bell had another culprit in mind: Ann Curry. So insistent was Bell that Curry was the problem — that she was “out of position,” as he put it in an e-mail to his deputies — that he had been talking about it with friends for months. One morning-TV veteran suggested to him that firing Curry, who had been co-hosting for only about six months at that point, would be tantamount to “killing Bambi.” Undeterred, Bell hatched a careful three-part plan: 1.) persuade Lauer to extend his expiring contract; 2.) oust Curry; 3.) replace her with Savannah Guthrie. According to this source, Bell called his plan Operation Bambi.

Bell, a 6-foot-4 former Harvard lineman, was well liked by his staff. He was considered a straight shooter who would do anything for the sake of the show. (Bell denies using the term “Operation Bambi.”) The coinage, however, was indicative of a few larger truths about morning television. Though it is created largely for women, the business is, even now, managed mostly by men, including those who like to think in terms of war, sabotage and embarrassing James Bond-like names for things they do in the office. It’s also marred by the striking effects of sleep deprivation: paranoia, hot tempers, rash decisions. It probably doesn’t help that morning hosts are, almost by definition, multimillionaires, making far more than the producers they supposedly work for, and far, far more than the staff members who toil for them at 5 a.m. It’s a situation unusually conducive to resentment.

At “Today,” the enmity started at the highest levels, between Bell and the man who was technically his boss, Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. Capus, who was known around the office as “the Rage,” a reference to his short temper, resented Bell, who was adept at navigating NBC’s internal politics and who was perceived to be close to Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal. When Capus learned that Bell wanted to force Curry out, he invoked “the streak” and argued that her removal would force the show out of first place. So Bell appealed directly to Burke. “We need to make a change,” Bell told him. Burke ultimately agreed. Operation Bambi was a go.

Photo

Top to bottom: Meredith Vieira, Katie Couric, Savannah Guthrie.Credit
Photo illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times. Digital composite by Picturehouse. Video stills from NBC.

Before she even arrived at Studio 1A, Curry’s ambition was legendary. In 1993, while anchoring an early-morning show called “NBC News at Sunrise,” Curry made a play for the weekend “Nightly News” slot. When it went to Brian Williams instead, she called the president of NBC News, Andrew Lack, at his home to express her frustration. When she eventually replaced Lauer as the “Today” news reader four years later, Curry jockeyed to fill in for Katie Couric every time Couric was away. According to several well-placed producers, Couric didn’t appreciate Curry’s eagerness. Producers said Couric thought Curry was melodramatic and, in a word that one used, “fake.”

As early as 2003, with three years to go until Couric’s contract expired, executives were already trying to nudge Curry off the co-host track. They saw that she and Lauer, who had hosted together dozens of times, demonstrated a distinct lack of chemistry. “I don’t think anybody back then thought Ann was right,” said Tom Touchet, the executive producer of “Today” at the time, who called her a “wacky chick” with a “great heart.” Neal Shapiro, who succeeded Lack as president of NBC News, suggested that Curry be moved to “Dateline NBC,” the prime-time newsmagazine. “The audience would understand moving to prime time was a great promotion, and there would be no backlash against ‘Today,’ ” Shapiro recalled. “By making her a host of ‘Dateline,’ we could open up the news-anchor job on ‘Today’ to someone like Natalie Morales or Hoda Kotb” and start publicly grooming another successor for Couric.

Ultimately, though, Jeff Zucker, who gave birth to the streak in 1995 as the young executive producer of “Today” and had risen in the corporate ranks ever since, quashed the plan. Zucker agreed that Lauer and Curry didn’t have chemistry, but he said that Curry was a crucial supporting player in the “First Family.” As Couric prepared to leave for CBS, Zucker decided to pursue Meredith Vieira as co-host. Zucker kept his courtship a secret from Curry. When Vieira agreed to take the job, in April 2006, Zucker called Curry to his office for what he said was a “very uncomfortable conversation.” As soon as Curry saw the direction of the talk, her tears started welling up. Curry told Zucker that she believed she had earned the chance to co-host. She said that she might leave the network.

Zucker, who was now on his way to being chief executive, told her that she could go, but that he genuinely wanted her to stay. Curry ultimately decided to wait for her next opportunity at the co-host chair. To protect herself, she had her agent add an “out” clause in her next contract, which allowed her to go to work for another network immediately if she was passed over again. (A source close to Curry denied that this meeting took place.)

After the Vieira kerfuffle blew over, NBC paid surprisingly little attention to a succession plan. Curry remained as the news reader at “Today,” cementing the impression among viewers that she would eventually succeed Vieira. In 2010, when Vieira’s contract was about to expire, she committed to just one more year. At the time, however, NBC was being acquired by Comcast. History suggests that big corporate maneuvers tend to coincide with changes in morning-TV fortunes, either because the new managers tinker with the product or fail to take it seriously. “G.M.A.” fell out of first place just as Capital Cities took over ABC in the mid-1980s. It clawed its way back in the mid-1990s, only to fall again when the Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC. The “Today” streak started months after the Disney deal was announced.

Around the time that NBC’s new owners asked him to leave, at the end of 2010, Zucker warned his lieutenants against promoting Curry to co-host. But it was no longer his call. In early 2011, after Vieira said she wanted to exit her contract a few months early, Capus went to bat for Curry’s ascendancy with his new boss, Steve Burke. He pointed to her Q Score, which was very high, and her popularity among focus groups. (NBC is probably the most data-driven of the broadcast networks.) Capus called it a “nondecision,” but loyalty had a lot to do with it, too. Capus went way back with Curry: he was her producer on “Sunrise” in the 1990s. She attended his wedding. “Steve felt very bad about not giving her the job,” a colleague said. Capus later told me, “It was her turn.”

Bell disagreed. He believed that just because Curry was beloved in one job didn’t mean she was right for another. He took some meetings with potentially poachable outsiders like Megyn Kelly, a rising star on the Fox News Channel. He also inquired about meeting with Robin Roberts, though it never happened. Ultimately, Bell went along with Curry’s promotion. “He wasn’t necessarily pro-Ann; he just didn’t have a better option,” the same colleague said.

Still, the fundamental reason Curry got the job had nothing to do with either her ambition or what the men who ran “Today” thought. In his pitch to Burke, Capus laid out the main issue: Lauer’s contract was set to expire at the end of 2012, and there was considerable uncertainty about whether he wanted to stay at “Today.” If Vieira left, and Curry was passed over again, she could exercise her right to run to a competitor. Then if Lauer left a year later, “Today” risked an existential crisis. It might have sounded like a paranoid chain reaction, but it was also a terrifying possibility. Burke’s decision, according to other NBC executives, became a nondecision: Curry had to stay in case Lauer didn’t. “If Meredith’s leaving and we can’t convince her not to leave,” he told Capus, “it goes to Ann.”

Curry turned out to be out of her depth almost immediately. During her first morning as co-host, on June 9, 2011, she made a joke about not wearing deodorant that made Lauer look genuinely embarrassed. The strikes against her added up fast: her critics said she sounded disingenuous in interviews, had an annoying habit of whisper-talking to grieving guests and struggled to read from the teleprompter. One day early in her tenure, according to a longtime staff member, Lauer told a production assistant, “I can’t believe I am sitting next to this woman.” (Lauer, through a spokeswoman, denied saying this.) Barely a month after she started, Bell confessed to a former colleague, “It was probably a mistake, but we just didn’t want to wake up and see Ann on another network.” (Bell later denied saying this.)

By the beginning of 2012, the same paranoia that had led NBC to promote Curry was now prompting conversations about demoting her. And so in February, Burke effectively initiated the first phase of Bell’s operation: he told Lauer about the plot to replace Curry with Guthrie, whose playful, sometimes bashful personality many of NBC’s top executives found appealing. She had more than held her own with Lauer whenever Curry was away, unlike Natalie Morales, her co-host in the 9 a.m. hour, who, executives believed, didn’t have the personality to carry the show.

Lauer, who was genuinely thinking about leaving “Today,” had wanted to put off his contract talks until the fall. Burke urged him to make up his mind by April so that, if he stayed, the network could introduce a new co-host in June, shortly before the Summer Olympics, NBC’s highest-rated weeks of the year. Lauer would later say that Burke told him Curry was going to be relieved of her post regardless of what he did. But that defies morning-television logic: NBC couldn’t afford to lose both anchors in the same year. According to a source with direct knowledge of the conversation, Burke told Lauer, “We need to sign you so we can do Ann.” Burke, who had to be keenly aware of Lauer’s discomfort with Curry, was basically scratching her off his list of reservations. (As a top NBC executive said to me after the fact, “Matt’s decision guided everything else.”) Burke even offered Lauer a signing bonus of several million dollars, according to the same person, to decide swiftly.

Lauer’s subsequent contract renewal, announced on April 6, called for him to earn a reported $25 million a year. Exactly a week later — coincidentally the same week that “Good Morning America” ended the “Today” streak after 852 weeks — Bell initiated Phase 2 of Operation Bambi. On Friday, April 13, he stopped by Curry’s dressing room as she packed for a vacation in California, and told her, “We need to talk as soon as you get back.” Curry wasn’t sure what to expect two weeks later, when they settled in for lunch at the opulent midtown French restaurant La Grenouille. The pair hadn’t agreed on much of anything since her promotion in June; Bell had even discouraged Curry from moving her belongings into the “Today” co-host office next to Lauer’s. (She moved in anyway.) While Curry regularly agitated for less sensationalism and more serious news coverage, Bell argued that tabloid fare about grisly murders and missing white women was an important part of the morning TV mix. In January, as Operation Bambi was coming together in his head, Bell confronted Curry about her reluctance to do the tabloid segments. “You need to be all in,” he told her harshly.

La Grenouille, with its grand dining room adorned with elaborate flower arrangements and silk wallpaper, was just the sort of setting for Bell to elegantly present his plan as a promotion. He ordered a bottle of wine and dove right in, suggesting that Curry move into a new roving correspondent role — he called it a “global anchor” — tailor-made for her. Knowing that Curry would have to see this as an opportunity, Bell turned up the charm. He explained that this was not just a step toward better journalism, but also a great way to brand “Today” as a serious show. She would never have to utter the name Casey Anthony again.

Bell ordered a second bottle of wine. Curry was stunned by what she was hearing. She had barely had the co-host job for nine months, and now Bell was proposing that she give it up? In the moment, Curry didn’t display any of the awkward behavior she showed on-air. She nodded her head at all the right moments and said she would like to be able to travel more. She may have had reservations, but she agreed to give his idea serious thought. As Bell later told colleagues, he believed he had “gotten her halfway there.”

That he was mistaken soon became abundantly clear. In May, after “G.M.A.” notched its second and third weekly victories over “Today,” numerous NBC executives concluded that Curry was in denial about her predicament. One complained about her “huge sense of entitlement,” saying she thought her “Today” post “was a Supreme Court appointment.” Truthfully, Curry didn’t know what to believe. Capus, although aware of Bell and Burke’s desire to fire Curry before the Olympics, was still trying to reassure Curry. He wanted to postpone any change until at least the end of the year. “Well,” she thought to herself, according to friends, “Steve is Jim’s boss, so if he says not to worry. . . .”

Photo

Willie GeistCredit
Photo illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times. Digital composite by Picturehouse. Video still from NBC.

The mixed signals, many people would later acknowledge, were a sign of how dysfunctional “Today” had become. The friction between Lauer and Curry paled in comparison to the infighting between Bell and Capus. As early as 2011, when Comcast took over NBC, Capus wanted to replace Bell, who he felt was ruining the show. Instead Burke promoted Bell to produce the Summer Olympics while still running “Today.” After the streak was snapped, their disagreements over the show deepened. Capus, like Curry, saw poor content choices — a daily diet of murder trials, questionable fashion trends and equally dubious celebrity gossip — as the underlying problem, even if those stories tended to score highest in the ratings. He blamed one of Bell’s top lieutenants, Noah Kotch, who was known to his detractors as “the trash doctor” because he programmed a disciplined menu of crime, sex and celebrity scandal in the 7:30 half-hour. In mid-April, Capus, who was rarely seen around “Today,” chastised the senior staff members for their reliance on TMZ and The Daily Mail.

This behind-the-scenes ugliness was starting to rupture TV’s “first family” veneer. On May 15, while interviewing Betty White, Curry exclaimed: “You’ve got two shows, you’re 90 years old. Honey, how — I mean, I barely am hanging on to one show!” By Memorial Day, Capus ceded to his bosses’ wishes and instructed Curry to hire a lawyer. Secret contract negotiations commenced, and by mid-June she was starting to come around to the roving-correspondent idea, at least until Bell and Burke’s Summer Olympics deadline was published in The New York Times. Curry was stunned by their callousness, and she felt the publicity surrounding the transition robbed her of a chance to exit gracefully, and she basically shut down. Her weepy departure on June 28 would have been a P.R. crisis for any network, but it was doubly bad for NBC, which employed just one dedicated P.R. person, Megan Kopf, to oversee all of “Today” — its stars, correspondents and producers. (Kopf was also trying to deal with the fallout while planning her wedding.) Of course, the ugly truths about “Today” couldn’t be spun by anyone. Mere hours after Curry’s signoff, Bell took his top producers to Brasserie Ruhlmann, a Rockefeller Plaza restaurant that often doubled as a high-end NBC cafeteria. One observer said that he led the group in raising wineglasses to toast her departure. The next day Guthrie’s appointment would be announced. Operation Bambi was complete.

Curry was sad after signing off, but also enraged. When critics blamed a lack of chemistry for her departure, she dismissed it to friends it as a euphemism for something else. “ ‘Chemistry,’ in television history, generally means the man does not want to work with the woman,” Curry was known to have remarked. “It’s an excuse generally used by men in positions of power to say, ‘The woman doesn’t work.’ ”

The ratings for the first episode of “Today” without her revealed that her fans had fled en masse. NBC executives expected the numbers to normalize after the Olympics, but there was only a downward spiral. On particularly bad days “Good Morning America” beat “Today” by a million viewers. Some of this was attributed to Curry’s fans exacting revenge. She was overwhelmed by condolences. “It feels like I died,” she told colleagues afterward, “and I’ve seen my own wake.”

Curry’s new contract, which pushed her salary beyond $5 million a year, more than she made as co-host, was partly granted, no doubt to guard against the impression that she was fired and to encourage her to keep any hurt feelings to herself — and not share them with any of the publishers lining up for a tell-all book. It was also meant to protect the show. And some executives believed that Curry did “not live up to her end of the bargain,” as one of them put it. After the tragic Aurora movie-theater shooting, NBC booked Curry on a flight to Colorado and announced that she would co-host the next day’s “Today” with Guthrie. The plan was intended to reassure viewers that all was well within “America’s First Family.” But Curry didn’t find out about the plan until after her plane landed and then refused to go along with it. Instead, she filed a single four-minute segment. One staff member was told to look into booking Curry and Guthrie on separate flights home.

After Curry’s departure, many NBC executives were coming around to the idea that it was the show that “didn’t work.” While Lauer and Guthrie were developing their rapport, Burke began to clean up “Today.” He rolled up NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC into one division and placed it under the management of Pat Fili-Krushel, one of his most trusted executives and, notably, a woman. Fili-Krushel immediately homed in on what she believed were the problems. “It just hasn’t evolved,” she told associates about the show. She wanted to make the show move faster and make its set feel warmer and friendlier. She also wanted to replace its producer. About a month after the Olympics ended, Fili-Krushel met with Bell and told him that he had a choice. He could produce “Today” or he could produce future Olympics broadcasts, but he couldn’t do both. And if he wanted to keep “Today,” he needed to “do some soul searching,” Fili-Krushel told him, “to decide if you have the energy to evolve this show.” Bell held on for weeks, even while Fili-Krushel and Capus started to consider candidates for his job. Eventually he chose the Olympics. (Bell disputes this account. He says he chose to focus on the Olympics independently.)

During this tumultuous period, NBC commissioned Sterling Brands, a consulting firm, to diagnose what exactly had gone wrong at “Today.” Sterling interviewed Lauer, Guthrie, Bell and nine other senior staff members anonymously, in order to keep their assessments private. The results turned out to be damningly frank. One of them said that “our sense of family is broken.” Another said, “Matt is being blamed, and some in our audience see Savannah as the younger replacement wife.” Another interviewee suggested that Curry wasn’t the only problem, saying, “People were leaving for the content, too.” But the most revealing comment had nothing to do with Curry at all. “If I look at the show,” one of the 12 people said, “I am not sure I’d know what year it is. I want to feel like we are watching 2012.” The staff members also went after “Good Morning America,” but they were honest about the competition’s strengths. “They look like they are having more fun,” the report concluded.

Even with Curry off the show, no one was having much fun at “Today” through the beginning of 2013. Almost exactly a year after the commencement of Operation Bambi, their world looked remarkably different. Curry was working on her two-and-a-half-minute “Nightly News” segment on the 27th floor; Bell was off running the Olympics. Capus had resigned. Even Kotch, the “trash doctor,” was gone. In the previous year, “Today,” locked in at No. 2, had ceded about $50 million in advertising. The only man still standing was Lauer, but he was damaged, too: viewers held him responsible for the family’s split. “I bet he hasn’t had one happy day since he renewed,” said an executive at a rival network.

And it wasn’t over. In January, the New York magazine writer Joe Hagan told NBC that he was piecing together an article about the stumbles at “Today.” Fearing that the article would come out worse if the network didn’t cooperate, NBC granted interviews with Lauer and others. But Lauer admitted to Hagan that he never tried to patch things up with Curry, which fueled the story line that he was the cause of her departure. Lauer also spoke to an extremely sympathetic interviewer, Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast, who published his article before Hagan’s story ran. That attempt at image rehabilitation was so transparent that it inspired headlines like “Matt Lauer Wasn’t Mean to Ann Curry, Says Matt Lauer.” Lauer’s contract wasn’t up until at least 2014, but on the third floor, staff members regularly asked each other to make the kinds of predictions that they once made about Curry: “Do you think Matt will be here this time next year?”

The office gossip became public when Deadline.com, Nikki Finke’s industry news Web site, got word that the office of Fili-Krushel had placed a call to the agent of Anderson Cooper, CNN’s biggest star, whose contract was coming up. Besides demonstrating the ability to guilelessly interview celebrities, Cooper passed the all-important “9/11 test” — shorthand, in network speak, for someone with the gravitas to deliver the most significant news stories. The call suggested that NBC was finally taking “Today” succession planning seriously, arguably something it had failed to do for years. But it again proved unable to keep its family business private. The in-house favorite to succeed Lauer, Willie Geist, who co-hosted the show’s 9 a.m. hour, felt stung.

The next day, to improve staff morale, Fili-Krushel threw an open bar “Today” staff party. And in the media, her lieutenants forswore any interest in going through with such a change. During a meeting with his anxious CNN staff, Cooper said pretty much the same thing. But Cooper and Fili-Krushel had actually met for coffee and discussed a role for him on “Today” — not this year, but perhaps in 2014. According to one person with direct knowledge, one option called for Cooper to overlap with Lauer for 12 months, allowing for an orderly transition.

What seems certain is that Lauer’s current “Today” contract will be his final one. His wife, Annette, wanted him to leave the show last year and stop splitting his time between their Upper East Side apartment, where he sleeps during the week, and their Hamptons home, where she lives with their three children. He decided to stay anyway. (An NBC spokeswoman denied this on Lauer’s behalf.) When I was introduced to Annette at a party a few weeks after his most recent contract was signed, I conveyed my enthusiasm for the show, saying, “I’ve been waking up with your husband for 15 years.” She shot back, “I have, too.” I brought up the new contract, and she said, somewhat bitterly, “Two more years, and then he’s mine.”

Lauer has said he signed again to stop “Today” from sliding. Even though that hasn’t happened, his job still seems safe. High-ranking sources within the company suggest that the only way Lauer would leave before his deal ends is if he wanted to. Few at NBC have the stomach for a repeat of last year.

In some sense, being overtaken by “Good Morning America” was the best thing that could have happened to “Today.” The streak blinded NBC from the fact that morning TV is facing the same pressures as the rest of the business. Nightly-news producers are reckoning with the effects of new technologies by focusing less on the day’s headlines and more on softer features. The executives who run prime time have also adjusted, monetizing their viewers’ ability to stream shows whenever they want to watch them. As more and more Americans spend their earliest hours scrolling through news alerts and weather forecasts on their smartphones and tablets, morning shows have to adapt, too. And their biggest competitive advantage may be that, unlike an iPhone, they offer some form of companionship. In the morning, family matters more than ever. While NBC was billing itself as the “first family,” “Good Morning America” was behaving like it. In the Fili-Krushel era, “Today” has returned to the team-sport model, pulling the camera out to show all four co-hosts at a new, bigger desk. The focus is greater on other members of the family, like Geist, whom viewers are starting to root for.

Lauer may yet lead “Today” back to No. 1, but the morning is tougher now than ever, with “Good Morning America” on one side and the serious-news interviewers of “CBS This Morning” on the other. There are about a dozen options on cable and more coming all the time. And history suggests that the road back is a long one. After the Norville debacle, it took “Today” five years to take the crown back from “G.M.A.” The reputation of Gumbel, Lauer’s best friend and predecessor, never quite recovered. Lauer had predicted that he would be hurt by his bosses’ plan to remove Curry, but he may have underestimated just how his fate was intertwined with hers.

Earlier this month, Lauer sought advice from his former co-host Meredith Vieira. On April 3 they met for lunch around noon at Park Avenue Spring, an upscale restaurant on East 63rd Street. They swapped stories about their children and then, according to another diner, talked about work in hushed tones. Vieira urged Lauer to tough it out, promising that the bad press would subside. Dessert arrived at the table by 1 p.m., but they lingered until 1:40, bantering the way they used to on television. Lauer held the door for her as they walked outside, and she embraced him, rubbing his back reassuringly and saying in his ear, “It’ll be O. K.”